A Kodi box is a TV box with a Kodi app that allows owners to stream films and sports for free

Kodi is the name of software which comes installed on so-called Kodi boxes.

It is not against the law to use Kodi, but it does become illegal when people use “add-ons” to watch sports, movies or any content that generally needs to be paid for. It’s also illegal to sell the boxes “fully loaded” with software which allows piracy.

Three websites which used to be owned by a defunct service called TVAddons.ag have now been handed over to a legal firm in Canada – which has remained tight-lipped about its reasons for overtaking the sites.

Nathan Betzen, a project manager at Kodi, fears that anyone who takes control of websites which were once used to distribute add-ons could “do whatever they wanted” to people using them.

“If some malware author wanted, he could easily install a watcher that reports back the user’s IP address and everything they were doing in Kodi,” he told Torrent Freak.

This means that anyone who used Kodi illegally could be grassed up to the authorities.